On 2009-07-10 13:56, J. Cliff Dyer wrote:
On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 11:57 -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
On 2009-07-10 11:50, J. Cliff Dyer wrote:
On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 02:57 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:28:04 +0100, Nobody wrote:
On Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:57:15 -0300, Gabriel Genellina wrote:
Nobody says you shouldn't check your data. Only that "assert" is not
the right way to do that.
"assert" is not the right way to check your *inputs*. It's a perfectly
reasonable way to check data which "should" be valid, as well as a way
to document what variables are supposed to contain.
Where are those variables coming from?
The distinction really boils down to this:
* asserts should never fail. If there is any chance that an assertion
might fail outside of test suites, then don't use assert.
I'm no expert, but the more I read this thread, and the more I think on
it, the more I believe that asserts don't really need to exist outside
of test suites.
Actually, there is a good argument that one shouldn't use an assert statement in
test suites: code can have bugs that only show up under -O so you want to be
able to run your test suite under -O.
That's an interesting point. Presumably TestCase.assert_() doesn't
suffer from this defect? Otherwise the entire unittest suite is
essentially broken by your argument.
It explicitly raises AssertionErrors. It does not use the assert statement.
I suppose I should have said one
should only raise AssertionErrors in test suites. Practically speaking,
that's what a test suite is: The place where you assert what the code
does.
Yup.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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